Exit Implies Entries Lament: Open Architecture in John Hejduk's IBA-1984/87 Immigrant Housing

Thursday April 2 / 5 pm / Room N-107

Esra Akcan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. She completed her architecture degree at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and her Ph.D and postdoctoral degrees at Columbia University in New York. She taught history-theory classes and architectural design studios at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Humboldt University in Berlin, Columbia University, New School, and Pratt Institute in New York, and METU in Ankara. Akcan received numerous awards and fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin, Graham Foundation, Clark Institute, Getty Research Institute, Canadian Center for Architecture, CAA, Mellon Foundation, DAAD and KRESS/ARIT.  She is the author of the books Architecture in Translation (Duke University Press, 2012), Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion, 2012, with Sibel Bozdoğan), Çeviride Modern Olan (YKY, 2009) and (Land)Fill Istanbul: Twelve Scenarios for a Global City (124/3, 2004). She guest edited an issue on globalization for Domus m, an issue on German-Turkish intertwined histories for Centropa, and one on writing Asian modernity for Nakhara. She has authored over a hundred articles in scholarly books and professional journals of multiple languages on contemporary theory (critical and postcolonial theory, globalization), modern and contemporary architecture in West Asia, Ottoman architectural photography, established Euro-American architects’ engagement with the Gulf States and the Middle Eastern diaspora in Europe.

Akcan’s scholarly work on a geopolitically conscious global history of architecture inspires her teaching. Her research on modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism foregrounds the intertwined histories of Europe and West Asia. Her book Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House offers a new way to understand the global movement of architecture that extends the notion of translation beyond language to visual fields. It advocates a commitment to a new culture of translatability from below and in multiple directions for a truly cosmopolitan ethics and global justice. Her co-authored book Turkey: Modern Architectures in History is part of a series that aims at an inclusive survey of modern world architecture, and is the first volume in any language to cover the entire twentieth century in Turkey. She is currently working on her next book on the urban renewal of Berlin's immigrant neighborhood, through which she explores a theory of open architecture.

This event is part of the Margins and Hyphens Seminar Series

Architectural histories and theories consistently aim for a radical redefinition of their role within broader discourses in the humanities. Acknowledging this persistent appetite for reassessment, this seminar series proposes to frame these concerns according to two basic formatting devices: the hyphen and the margin.

As defined in the Chicago Manual of Style’s section on “Manuscript Preparation Guidelines for Authors,” in order “to leave enough room for handwritten queries, margins of at least one inch should appear on all four sides of the hard copy” of a manuscript. In the most pragmatic sense, the margin serves as the necessary space for the expansion, clarification, and nuancing of the main body of a text. The margin is the liminal space in which a work is demarcated, challenged or even aligned with another entity. It is a critical distance.

On the other hand, the CMS stresses that the “only hyphens that should appear in the manuscript are hyphens that would appear regardless of where they appeared on the page.” Compound words alone, formed by a minimum of two distinct entities, allow for such orthographic figuration. The hyphen, a tool for juxtaposition, amalgamation, synthesis, facilitates the disciplinary frictions that texture the surfaces of architectural discourse.

Margins and hyphens—as spatial, epistemological, and formatting considerations—unavoidably shape documents. In Margins and Hyphens, we seek to bring into focus how they shape critical positions through the texture of writing itself.

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